What the Frock! is back… for one night only

For one night only, Bristol’s award-winning all-female comedy night What The Frock! is back.

WTF’s phenomenally popular compere Cerys Nelmes returns to host an impressive lineup including Kate Smurthwaite, Evelyn Mok (pictured top), Amy Mason and Ada Campe.

This special, one-off comedy show is a fundraiser for the charity Bristol Women’s Voice and is part of BWV’s series of events throughout 2018 celebrating the centenary of (some) women finally receiving the vote.

Here’s What The Frock! founder Jane Duffus.

Tell us about the night, and why WTF! has come back for another date. 
After a two-year hiatus, I’m very excited to be bringing What The Frock! Comedy back for a one-off show. With 2018 being the centenary of when (some) women achieved the vote, there is a huge amount of celebratory activity going on all around the UK, and in Bristol it is extra exciting as we are the only city in the south to have won funding for this from the Government Equalities Office to be a Centenary City, and this is all thanks to the charity Bristol Women’s Voice.
So, the What The Frock! on March 2 is the opening event for BWV’s big weekend of events to mark International Women’s Day, which continues on the Saturday (March 3) with a whole day of talks, walks, workshops and more at City Hall. And keeps going throughout the year as BWV’s Deeds Not Words programme.

Ada Campe

And what about the lineup on the night?
We have five comedians including our resident compere Cerys Nelmes, without whom it would be impossible to do a Frock! show as she is so much a part of the brand. I can’t possibly pick a favourite out of the other four acts, but I can tell you a little bit about them and invite you to come along to the show and decide for yourself who you like best.
Kate Smurthwaite has been at a few Frock!s over the years and was the compere at our very first show back in 2012. She’s become a great friend and audiences love her for her forthright feminist comedy.

Kate Smurthwaite

I’m also pleased to welcome back Evelyn Mok, who last did a show with us about three years ago. She describes herself as the best thing to come out of Sweden since IKEA, but she’s been nominated for a clutch of comedy awards and last year took her debut solo hour to the Edinburgh Fringe.
Compared to the others, Amy Mason is a relative comedy newcomer as she’s only been on the circuit about six months but I think Bristol audiences will love her. Amy lived in Bristol for many years and is busy trying to move back here, and when she’s not doing stand-up, she’s an award-winning novelist and a super-successful playwright who has just performed her third show at Bristol Old Vic.
Lastly, our headliner Ada Campe is the alter ego of suffrage historian Naomi Paxton. Ada has just won the variety award at the New Acts of the Year Show, so I can confirm to Bristol audiences that they will be in the company of comedy royalty. Described as “monstrously funny” by comedian Rosie Wilby, Ada is a blend of comedy, magic and storytelling that will make it patently clear why her 2017 Edinburgh show is currently in the finals for the Funny Women show of the year.

Very nice to see What the Frock! back in action. Will there be more from you in future?
Why, thank you. The response has been overwhelmingly lovely and supportive since I announced that What The Frock! was coming back for the night, and the tickets have sold so well. We’ve just moved to a bigger venue (we are now at the Redgrave Theatre following the sudden closure of the Bierkeller last week) and have been able to put an extra 100 tickets on sale, which is wonderful as we had sold out the Bierkeller. The night is a fundraiser for Bristol Women’s Voice, so the more tickets we sell, the more money we can give to the charity.

Amy Mason

However, it’s such a phenomenal amount of work putting on a night. In theory, it should be just a case of booking a venue, booking a few acts and listing the tickets online. But that overlooks the tedious to-ing and fro-ing with venues, trying to get the right balance of acts to make a good bill, the endless promoting of tickets, trying to get press and publicity etc etc… and then dealing with acts who have to cancel and need replacing and, worse, the venue closing three weeks before the show, as happened when the Bierkeller suddenly shut. Thank goodness I’ve never had to deal with finding a new venue at short notice before…  that was definitely one of the hardest challenges I’ve had to deal with as a promoter.
So with all that in mind, What The Frock! will just be an occasional pop-up event from now on.

What the Frock! was set up in January 2012 to give more of a platform to female comedians. Are female comics getting more of a platform now than when you started?
Hmm. I did some sums on this about a year ago and, depressingly, the statistics overall are pretty much the same as they were in 2012. Back in 2012, and periodically thereafter, I would take a snapshot survey of a handful of comedy clubs in big UK cities, and look at the acts playing in them on one given night. There were always some with no women whatsoever, and those that did have a woman on the bill never had more than one. That never changed. It’s totally depressing. You turn on the TV, and on panel shows there is still largely only ever one woman on the programme and the amount of airtime given to her compared to the men on the panel is often much less. Nothing much has changed there (see also Sally Phillips’ thoughts on this).
But then you look a little deeper, and while more mainstream comedy hasn’t moved with the times, there are big differences being made under the surface. At the moment, for instance, The Mash Report on BBC2 is really interesting, because it’s not the anchor Nish Kumar who is getting all the attention and the millions of YouTube hits: it’s Rachel Parris, who does a five-minute topical segment on sexual harassment, or Donald Trump or whatever, and is far and away the funniest person on the show.

Or look at the Edinburgh Festival, where last year an unprecedented four women were nominated for the headline award (out of nine nominees) and one of the joint winners, Hannah Gadsby, was a woman. And while I say that TV panel shows haven’t moved with the times (and note, it’s only TV shows to which the BBC’s ‘token woman’ policy applies, not radio) there are some presenters who insist on having an equal number of men and women on their shows, such as David Mitchell on The Unbelievable Truth on Radio 4. We could do with more men taking a stand in this way and saying ‘no’ to shows having no women or just one token woman.
So… in the bigger picture, no, women in comedy don’t seem to be getting more seats at the table. But there have definitely been huge leaps on the fringe circuit and I think it won’t be too long before that explodes through into the mainstream. I mean, good grief, it would only be about 150 years overdue!

Cerys Nelmes

Gender equality in various forms (equal pay; right to work in a welcoming atmosphere without fear of harassment, etc) has been a prominent topic in the past year or so. Do you see this as a time of great progress in gender equality?
Conversations about gender equality have been going on for centuries, literally, and they’re getting a tiny bit louder with each passing year. It’s a snowball effect, each previous success builds the confidence of the next generation of women to take it that bit further and so on and so on. From Mary Wollstonecraft writing in 1792 that she wanted women to take control of their lives, to the suffragists petitioning for votes for women in the 1860s, to women forming police forces and joining the military in the 1910s, into the consciousness raising movement of the 1970s and onwards… the swell has never died down.
So yes, in recent months there has been increasing media attention given to topics such as Weinstein, #MeToo, the BBC gender pay gap, the lack of women on boards etc… but this isn’t a new trend for feminism, it’s just getting louder, and I think the change in the way we communicate is having an effect on that. We are no longer constrained by what the media chooses to tell us, we can now write that communication ourselves online and that’s having a big effect.
Also, ahem… I’ve just written a book, The Women Who Built Bristol (also a fundraiser for Bristol Women’s Voice) about Bristol’s wonderful history of strong women, so there’s loads more info in there. Some might say it’s a lovely companion to The What The Frock! Book of Funny Women which I wrote in 2015 to celebrate more than 100 years of fantastically funny women.

Tell us about Bristol Women’s Voice and why you’re glad to support them.
BWV was formed in 2012 to act as a powerful voice to make equality for women in Bristol a reality. That’s the headline information. The reality is that the charity does so, so, so much, with astonishingly few resources or paid staff. BWV’s work includes raising awareness of maternity rights among expectant mothers, encouraging more women to stand for local council, tackling sexism in schools… it also has a huge ongoing project in Zero Tolerance that is dedicated to tackling gender-based violence and discrimination in our city. And this is just the tip of the iceberg.
All of this is done on a shoestring budget. I’ve been a member of BWV since the first day it launched and have been a trustee since 2015. So I’m completely biased in my choice of charity for this fundraising Frock!, but it really is a charity for all of Bristol to be proud of. I’m not sure if any other city in the UK has an equivalent.

What The Frock! Comedy and Bristol Women’s Voice Present… Friday, March 2, Redgrave Theatre. For more info and to book tickets, visit www.wegottickets.com/event/423544

For more on Bristol Women’s Voice and their Deeds Not Words programnme, visit www.bristolwomensvoice.org.uk/deeds-not-words-programme

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